Rail Safety & Derailment investigation

Colin will examine train derailment investigation. He will give a basic summary of how the investigations are conducted. Then, he will review three major rail incidents and his personal experiences with them – two in Australia and one in the USA. The two Australian examples will be Waterfall and the Broadmeadows runaway train in Melbourne. The USA example will be the “Big Bayou Canot Bridge catastrophe” - in Mobile, Alabama, an Amtrak passenger train ran off a bridge into the water.

Colin’s significant experience in Rail Safety includes:

·Safety Manager for the John Holland Group (Rail Division) on the southern rail corridor between Sydney and Melbourne.

·Lead Investigator for the Australian Transport Safety Bureau investigating a major derailment of a freight train at Ararat in Victoria. This involved the complete management of this investigation from the original notification until publishing of the report on the ATSB web site.

·Managing the Rail Coordination Centre for the State Rail Authority of NSW ensuring the monitoring and coordination activities of the Sydney Metropolitan and NSW Networks.